After approximately two hours of deliberation, the jury in the federal kidnapping and conspiracy trial of James Ford Seale returned a unanimous verdict of guilty on all counts. The jury found Seale guilty of two counts of kidnapping and one count of conspiracy in the abduction and murder of Charles Moore and Henry Dee.

After the verdict was read, Seale turned to his wife, Jean Seale, and asked, "Are you OK?"

Family members of the victims embraced. Donna Collins, who is the daughter of Henry Dee's sister Thelma Collins, said: "I feel great. I feel like I could leap off the tallest building and fly because (her mother) can have some relief."

"I would like to thank the jurors for the work they did, that they did take care of Mississippi," Thelma Collins said.

Seale faces a maximum life sentence on each count.

Jurors began deliberating at 4:20 p.m. this afternoon after nine days of testimony. U.S. Attorney Dunn Lampton, who re-opened the case against Seale in 2005, delivered closing arguments for the prosecution, followed by Special Litigation Counsel Paige Fitzgerald, who began the prosecution's case with her dramatic opening statements on June 4. Federal Public Defender Kathy Nester, who was both creative and aggressive in her defense of Seale, spoke for the defense.

Lampton flexed his oratory muscles Thursday morning while describing the drowning deaths of Charles Moore and Henry Dee on May 2, 1964.

"They had to have been absolutely terrified, full of dread and wondering why," he said of Dee and Moore, whom he depicted as two well-liked, unobtrusive teenagers.

"They were just two people waiting for a ride," he said.

Lampton then described star witness Charles Marcus Edwards' testimony that Seale and other Klansmen picked up Dee and Moore, interrogated and beat them in the Homochitto National Forest, bound them in the trunk of Ernest Parker's truck and drove them through parts of Louisiana to Parker's landing, to be dumped in an offshoot of the Mississippi River.

"As that trunk opens, don't you imagine just for a second they thought they would be released?" he asked.

"Surely they struggled some, but they were outnumbered, and they knew what was going to happen. And I think we know what happened," Lampton told the jury.

He then described the thoughts that might have gone through Charles Moore's mind as he watched Henry Dee be drowned first--the order Edwards gave in testimony.

"And then Charles Eddie Moore heard the splash. And then they came back for him. And he's tied down, and he's beginning to think of the manner of how he's going to die. He would've looked in their eyes and sought some pity, some reason, some release--but he died."

He then described, in anguished detail, the physical process of drowning.

"His last thought would have been: 'Why? What did I do? Why am I here?' After 43 years, we're here to answer some of those questions for you," Lampton said, echoing the style of Fitzgerald's opening statement.

During that statement, Fitzgerald referred to Seale's Nov. 1964 statement to an FBI agent who had accused him of the Dee-Moore murders, "Yes. But I'm not going to admit it; you are going to have to prove it."

"Well, ladies and gentlemen, after 43 years, we are here to do just that," Fitzgerald said then.

During her closing statement today, she referred again to Seale's statement.

"Those are the words of a guilty man--defiant, arrogant and unrepentant," she said.

"This man managed to drown Charles Moore and Henry Dee, but he could not drown the truth," she added.